Acts Fellowship Church

This morning, I spent an hour or two rewriting some of the Directory List-all script to reduce the load times. Somewhere while I was testing out the changes, I messed up and basically put the script into an infinite loop. FTP and web access slowed to a crawl, but this was nothing new in the world of script debugging.

What was new was what occurred next: I almost immediately got a gmail pop-up on the bottom-right corner of my screen. New message from JaguarPC support.

I checked my e-mail, and here's what it said:

Hello,

Your account actsaustin.org hosted on Carbon server is receiving very high number of http requests on a script xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.pl and crashing it. We have been monitoring this for the last couple of hours. Carbon is a shared hosting server with shared resources among 150~200 users. Please check our semi-dedicated plans that we are offering. Semi-dedicated servers are limited to 10 users per server which allows more system resources to be available per user.

Please also note that upgrading your account is a smooth process without any downtime for your website. It is advisable that you upgrade as soon as possible to avoid any downtime. To upgrade now, please open a support ticket for the sales department or email them at sales@jaguarpc.com

Regards,
Masood N. | Support Dept.
Jaguar Technologies, LLC.
http://www.jaguarpc.com/


. . . .

So... I fixed the script and told them there shouldn't be any more problems. Good news is, I finalized the fixes before this happened. Bad news is, we're probably on their radar now. So if anything else causes server hang-ups (and we run a fair amount of complex scripts that may cause something), I don't know what will happen.

What I DO know is that upgrading to a semi-dedicated server would bump up our billing from $5.95 a month to $34.95 a month. I don't know if that is in our budget. The steering advisory was kind enough to increase webteam budget from $15/yr to $200/yr this past January, which should be taken as a sign of respect for what the webteam has done, and as a sign an importance for what the site means to the ministry. But that's still not enough to cover the upgrade cost (which I'm really hoping isn't gonna be necessary).

So what does this mean? Hopefully nothing. Hopefully nothing else goes wrong to catch the attention of the JaguarPC admins, and our presence on a shared server (for relative chump change) won't cause any problems.

Worst case scenario? We're either forced to upgrade OR remove the directory (or severely restructure it).

So anyway, this was one of the reasons we removed directory list-all access from guest logins (in case you hadn't noticed), as the way it was written previously was causing much greater load on the server. This should be fixed now, but there's still other issues before I allow list-all access to guest logins.

Anyway, I'll keep you guys posted. Posted by bwa at May 31, 2005 01:21 PM